Just Too Busy

Matthew 22: 1-14

October 9, 2005

Just Too Busy

They were too busy. Can you imagine that? They were too busy to accept the king's invitation to the wedding feast for his son. How stupid! The parable is told in both the gospels of Matthew and Luke and it is in Luke that the excuses for the refusal by those first invited are given in detail and, interesting to me, at least, begin to sound all too familiar.

In Luke the parable is told this way: "A man once gave a great banquet, and invited many; and at the time for the banquet he sent his servant to say to those who had been invited, 'Come; for all is now ready.' But they all alike began to make excuses. The first said to him, 1 have bought a field, and I must go out and see it; I pray you, have me excused.' And another said, 'I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I go to examine them; I pray you, have me excused.' And another said, I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.'" (Luke l4:16-20) Yep! Too busy. I'll take a rain check. Except there was no rain check. This was a once in a lifetime event. Look what they missed just because they were too darned busy.

The most common complaint I hear about life in general is that there is never enough time to do everything that needs to be done. People are too darned busy. They are desperate to squeeze just a few more minutes into every day. Multitasking is the newest buzzword. It’s not enough to stop and smell the roses anymore. You have to water them, fertilize them, prune them, and weed them at the same time. Wrapped up in such multitasking we miss the beauty and fragrance of the rose.

A devoted husband brought a guest home to dinner one day. As the two entered the home, the husband kissed his wife tenderly at the door. Following the meal, the husband again caressed his dear spouse and thanked her for the delicious dinner. When he departed with the guest, he again kissed his wife at the door. Such actions impressed the guest tremendously and he asked the man: "Do you always kiss your wife like this?" And he answered: "Most assuredly, every day." The man went home determined to accord his wife similar caresses. He opened the door, went to his wife who was still BUSY with housework in the kitchen and deliberately showered her with kisses and caresses. She began to scream and cry: "What a terrible day I have had! The children have been unusually naughty. The washing machine broke down. The plumbing sprang a leak. The light went off during a storm. And to top it all off, you come home drunk!"

Women are busier than ever. A study fifty years ago stated that women then devoted more than eighty hours a week cleaning the house, cooking meals, and taking care of the children. The kinds of home-making and child-rearing demands have changed in the past fifty years, but the time demand hasn’t.

For example, housewives spent more time doing laundry in the 1970's than they did in the 1920's, this with supposed laborsaving devices. And now women are trying to add demands of office, classroom and business on top of them. Who has time for a banquet?

It is true for men as well. Executives and middle-management folk work nights and weekends to stay ahead of the competition, while many laborers work overtime or hold down more than one job to support lifestyles they deem satisfactory. As the Queen of Hearts said in Alice in Wonderland, "It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!" It's not called the rat race for nothing. It must be an addiction because, for many, not even retirement brings relief. I can’t tell you how many times I hear retired folks say, “I’m busier now than before I retired" or "I can’t wait to retire from retirement."

In the midst of this frenzy God invites you to a banquet. God has laid out for you an incredible feast that includes love, mercy, reconciliation, forgiveness, peace, acceptance, and eternal life. That banquet is there in moments of private devotion. That banquet is there in the Sunday gathering of believers around Word and Sacrament. If you are at your wits end, if you feel like you are being pulled in three directions at one time, if your life is torn between dog-tired one minute and a scream of frustration in another, it's because you've been too busy for that banquet. Oh, you may be sitting in church, but you're not really feasting on the presence of God. You haven’t shut off the engine, you're just impatiently idling. And if you take time at all for Bible reading, it is more likely a hurried affair to get on to more pressing concerns. It's like coming to the banquet table and not eating. If we are to end with the peace of God, we must begin in the presence of God. And if we are too busy for that, we are simply too busy.

In A Journey with the Saints, Thomas S. Kepler has written: "The secret of the revolution in the lives of the saints lies in the fact that their lives are centered in God. They never seem hurried, they have a large leisure, they trouble little about their influence; they refer the smallest things to God. They live God." That is the great secret to successful living—the realization that when one reserves time to come to God's banquet, all of the rest of life will fall into place.

But of course, that will require that we make some difficult choices. Victor Frankl wrote: "Unless a man wishes to drown he has to become selective. That is to say, he has to become able to select when to turn on the TV set, when to turn it off, what books and what journals to read and what to throw in the wastebasket. Selectiveness means that we have to be responsible for what is important and what is not, what is essential and what is not, what is meaningful and what is not."

There is a good story from years ago about a top executive with a telegraph company who went on a trip. It was extremely cold outside when he arrived at the bus station, so he went into a local telegraph station hoping to get warmed up. When he got inside, however, it was cold. He noticed there was no fire in the fireplace. He said to the young telegraph operator, "Why don’t you build a fire in this place and warm it up?"

The young man said, "Listen mister, I'm too busy sending telegrams to build fires."

The man then told this boy that he was the vice-president of the company and that he wanted him to send a telegram to the home office at once. The message was, "Fire this man immediately." A moment later the young telegraph operator brought a load of wood into the office and began to build a fire. The executive asked, "Young man, have you sent that telegram yet?"

The young telegraph operator said, "Listen mister, I'm too busy building fires to send telegrams."

The point is that somewhere in life we have to set priorities. We have to decide what really matters and make certain that the really important things are done. Time with our family, service to our community, attention to our work, relaxation, self-improvement—we could develop a list of important issues that would go on and on. Somewhere we must draw a line. And when God is our first choice, drawing that line becomes easier and easier.

A mental hospital developed an unusual test to determine when their patients were ready to go back into the world. They would bring the patient being considered for release into a room with a sink. When the patient entered the room a faucet over the sink was already on, the sink was overflowing, and water was pouring onto the floor. The patient was handed a mop and asked to clean up the mess. If the patient had enough sense to turn off the faucet before starting to mop up the water, the doctors concluded he was ready to go back into society. But if he started mopping with the water still running, more treatment was needed. Could you and I pass that test?

You and I need to stop mopping long enough to look up and see if the faucet is still running. We need to go to the root of our restless, confused lives. We have crowded out God and without God life is simply a whirlwind of meaningless activity. We need to center our lives in Him and His purposes. Then we discover that life truly is a feast. He offers an invitation to His banquet table. Will we have time to accept?

May the peace of God that passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. Amen.